MIT

People will soon be given access to knowledge from one of the world's foremost technology institutes for free over the internet, as BBC World ClickOnline's Ian Hardy reports.

Like almost every organisation in the US, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spent the late 1990s struggling with the question of how to take advantage of the internet.
Many other colleges launched online degree courses aimed at anyone with a modem and a big wallet.
But MIT has taken a completely different direction with a project called OpenCourseWare (OCW) that could stop the trend of commercialising online education dead in its tracks.
The first group of courses are set to be published on the internet on 30 September, including subjects like anthropology, biology, chemistry and computer science.

MIT staff point out that if this initiative is successful, and other institutions follow, it will put the net back on track towards its original goal of sharing information and knowledge around the world, rather than selling CDs and t-shirts.

Thank you Jan!! - this is GREAT news! i've bookmarked the page and will be watching what happens with it very closely! i am hoping their goal for free on-line education will reach many that would not otherwise be able to either physcially, or financially, obtain such knowledge.

What is Kerberos?
Kerberos is a network authentication protocol. It is designed to provide strong authentication for client/server applications by using secret-key cryptography. A free implementation of this protocol is available from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kerberos is available in many commercial products as well.

The Internet is an insecure place. Many of the protocols used in the Internet do not provide any security. Tools to "sniff" passwords off of the network are in common use by malicious hackers. Thus, applications which send an unencrypted password over the network are extremely vulnerable. Worse yet, other client/server applications rely on the client program to be "honest" about the identity of the user who is using it. Other applications rely on the client to restrict its activities to those which it is allowed to do, with no other enforcement by the server.

Some sites attempt to use firewalls to solve their network security problems. Unfortunately, firewalls assume that "the bad guys" are on the outside, which is often a very bad assumption. Most of the really damaging incidents of computer crime are carried out by insiders. Firewalls also have a significant disadvantage in that they restrict how your users can use the Internet. (After all, firewalls are simply a less extreme example of the dictum that there is nothing more secure then a computer which is not connected to the network --- and powered off!) In many places, these restrictions are simply unrealistic and unacceptable.

Kerberos was created by MIT as a solution to these network security problems. The Kerberos protocol uses strong cryptography so that a client can prove its identity to a server (and vice versa) across an insecure network connection. After a client and server has used Kerberos to prove their identity, they can also encrypt all of their communications to assure privacy and data integrity as they go about their business.